West Hollywood’s selection last week of 16 licensees to operate cannabis consumption lounges and cannabis restaurants in city business districts located on some of Southern California’s most famous streets revolutionizes and mainstreams public consumption in America’s legal cannabis states.

Eight licensees were approved to operate lounges that may allow all forms of cannabis consumption — smoking, vaping, eating edibles — as well cook and serve fresh-made “virgin” foods with THC and CBD sauces on the side. Eight licensees were approved to cook and serve cannabis-infused foods in restaurant settings and for private dinners not featuring smoking or vaping. All lounges will be tied to retail cannabis stores.

Other retail cannabis licenses issued include on the world’s first hotel-based cannabis boutique and white-glove delivery service, Lord Jones at The Standard Hotel on world-famous Sunset Strip.

Proposed lounge designs, environmentally conscious and alternative-energy aware, are contemporary eye-candy ranging from modest-chic to full-on lavish, befitting Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards, West Hollywood’s primary drags where lounges and retail stores are allowed, along with Melrose Avenue. Many lounges will feature entertainment. All will offer wellness and community services and will contribute to neighborhood security.

While licensees include veterans of Los Angeles hospitality, entertainment, wellness and cannabis industries, four of the best-known cannabis chefs in America — Jeff Danzer, Andrea Drummer, Holden Jagger and Brandon Allen — are involved in approved teams. One of Southern California’s best dispensaries, Greenwolf, and an owner of L.A.-based mids- and sub-mids bargain brands Loudpack and Dime Bag scored too, as did longtime medicinal cannabis activist Don Duncan of Americans for Safe Access.

When business secure locations and obtain operating permits in 2019, West Hollywood officials envision the high-energy city becoming a buzzworthy legal cannabis destination. WeHo leaders see WeHo cannabis lounge clientele and WeHo bar, hotel and restaurant clientele overlapping and visiting other businesses in the city that’s more stylish than nearby Hollywood and hipper than abutting Beverly Hills.

The story I propose highlights radically mainstreaming and consumer-and- industry-friendly aspects of West Hollywood’s lounge ordinance, which allows on-premises cooking and food service; attracted some of California’s top cannabis-cuisine talent; allows outdoor and rooftop smoking; allows operating hours 6 a.m.-2 a.m. seven days a week; and may rocket West Hollywood — home to the famed Sunset Strip and legendary music clubs Whisky a Go Go, The Viper Room and The Troubadour — to the top-ranking cannabis destination in America.

Meanwhile, for context, West Hollywood’s radically mainstreaming cannabis consumption lounge regulations advanced while Ontario’s clean-air smoking regulations are putting cannabis lounges out of business and Canadian cannabis consumers out on the streets; as Alaska just approved cannabis lounge regulations after two years of fits and starts; as San Francisco’s Vapor Room, now the city’s ninth lounge, reopened in a brighter space and climate six years after being closed by the feds; just before Tick Segerblom, the Nevada state senator who championed cannabis legislation, joins the county commission that controls the artsy part of old Las Vegas set to welcome lounges in 2019; and while consumption lounges aren’t sparking in Denver.

Ed’s Note: I researched and wrote food, beer and travel stories in British Columbia when I lived in Tacoma WA in the mid-2000s. I was a card-carrying member of The Cannabis Buyers Club of Canada and visited Victoria regularly. Canadian cannabis tourism opportunities I envisioned then bud today. British Columbia’s royally quaint capital is directly and easily reachable via ferry from Seattle. A walkable city with double-decker buses that get you around, you can visit Terp City and Nuage vapor lounges and Victoria’s great gastro pubs without risking DUIs.

Sustainability and seasonality rule Victoria, where the art and science of food is a cut above pub grub.

BY ED MURRIETA

VICTORIA, British Columbia – A bartender asked where I’m from. I told him.

“You guys have a lot of great beers down there,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied. “The food’s better up here.”

I wasn’t simply acting polite in this commonwealth capital better known for flowers than food. I was trying not to act like one of those Pacific Northwest Americans who get googly-eyed over Canada.

It was a rainy day in November. I’d just enjoyed a glowing bowl of carrot soup that parted the clouds.

Originally published in the Tacoma News Tribune, Jan. 12, 2005

BY ED MURRIETA

When the pipe dreams of food entrepreneurs, hemp activists and libertarian farmers come true, America’s fruited plains will be ripe with emerald waves of industrial hemp, a plant deeply rooted in the nation’s fabric and politics.

Hemp will rotate with corn and soybean crops, boosting domestic farming, processing and manufacturing as the United States joins industrialized economies from Germany to China in hemp cultivation.

Before American consumers get a mainstream hit of hemp, however, some hemp activists insist the ultimate shift in consciousness must occur: The United States government must end its prohibition against marijuana, hemp’s heady cousin.

These entangled political, market and consumer issues have bummed hemp’s high hopes of becoming the greatest thing since soy.

Enhance the city’s 2018 James Beard winners with the city’s best dispensaries and smoking-vaping lounges.

Dominique Crenn, left, and Barbary Coast.

BY ED MURRIETA

Four San Francisco culinary stars were recognized by the 2018 James Beard Foundation Awards this week. By way of toasting their accomplishments and complementing their allure, here are my suggestions for pairing San Francisco’s Beard award-winners and the city’s best legal commercial cannabis experiences.

Dominique Crenn + Barbary Coast

Poetic, adventuresome, traditional and modernist all describe San Francisco’s two Michelin star chef and the city’s sexiest cannabis destination. Dominique Crenn, chef and owner of Atelier Crenn, Bar Crenn and Petit Crenn, won the Beard award for best chef in the Western United States. If there was an analogous award for best all-in-one store-dab bar-smoke lounge in the West, it would be Barbary Coast. Aesthetically an homage to old-school San Francisco’s Gilded Era vice district. Barbary Coast is straight-up state-of-the-art — from high-end concentrates to high-tech vaporizers and HVAC systems that silently suck smoke from the room so it doesn’t stink up your clothes.

B. Patisserie + SPARC

The work-and-life partners behind B. Patisserie, a small Pacific Heights bake shop with a cult-like following, are San Francisco baking royalty. Belinda Leong was pastry chef at San Francisco fine-dining notables Gary Danko and Manresa. Michael Suas founded the San Francisco Baking Institute. Get their killer kouign amann to go and enjoy the buttery Britney-style croissant buns South of Market at SPARC, along with Volcano-vaped, farm-grown, lab-tested cannabis and free hot tea from the self-serve bar. (SPARC told me $2 cups of organic family-farmed coffee are on the way.)

In Situ + Urban Pharm

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s restaurant serves “borrowed” dishes “on loan” from world-renowned chefs. Feed your head on a la carte dabs at Urban Pharm (or smoke joints if that’s your jam) then feast your eyes on intentionally spare alternate dimensions at In Situ, which won the Beard award for Outstanding Restaurant Design (76 seats and over). Like In Situ, Urban Pharm elides polished and raw, a steampunked Burning Man blend of cut metal and re-purposed wood.

Zuni Cafe + The Apothecarium

The iconic restaurant’s roast chicken and hamburger are both longtime legends. Now. Zuni’ Cafe‘s front of the house gets its due — Beard’s Outstanding Service award. Hop on a classic street car for a half-mile ride to The Apothecarium, the flagship of three local cannabis stores where chandeliers, marble counters and soft music ooze elegance of high-end jewelry boutiques. To match Zuni’s service, let The Apothecarium’s professional consultants guide you through a delicious selection of California’s best edibles, concentrates and cannabis strains.

The Hemperor, New Belgium Brewing Company’s new IPA, is not the first beer brewed with hemp seeds.

Nor is it the first beer to celebrate the botanical, olfactory and gustatory similarities between hops and cannabis.

It is, however, the first hemp-infused India pale ale — an HIPA — to be distributed across the United States.

And The Hemperor, released in early April by the Colorado brewery best known for the Fat Tire brand, is certainly the first adult beverage in the legal cannabis era that’s been engineered in a laboratory to mimic the aromas and flavors of cannabis while containing no trace of the plant’s psychoactive cannabinoids.

Prohibited by the federal government from brewing with hemp flowers that would impart aromas and flavors mirrored in hops along with non-psychoactive cannabinoids like therapeutic CBD, New Belgium brews The Hemperor with hemp hearts, the meat of shelled hemp seeds, which imbue a mild, hazy nuttiness but no intoxicating effects of cannabis, hemp’s botanical sister and hops’ botanical cousin.

To mimic cannabis terpenes, New Belgium draws on other natural ingredients. In The Hemperor’s herbaceous case, natural cannabis aroma and flavor means those attributes were engineered in a laboratory to parrot pot’s polymorphic punches to noses and mouths using extracts from natural aromatics like citrus peel, grapefruit and pine sap.

The Hemperor is on tap in 49 states (Kansas bans hemp products) and will be released in six-pack bottles in late May.

I paid $4 for a 5-ounce pour of The Hemperor at Capitol Hop Shop in Sacramento on Friday, 4/20.

The Hemperor announced itself as the bartender set the rosette glass in front of me — a waft of familiar cannabis that caught my nose and whipped my neck side to side to pick up the aroma’s source. Continue reading

From Montezuma to your grandma, chocolate tops many peoples’ list of life’s pleasures. What could be better than chocolate? Better chocolate.

With that in mind, I asked three big names in California chocolate to eyeball and taste-test the chocolate contained in leading brands on sale in California cannabis stores. They all agreed. Taste-test pending an editor’s purchase of the story.

Never mind effects. Experts will focus solely on brands’ chocolate quality, assessing cannabis bars on appearance, flavors and mouthfeel, caring more about cacao content than THC strength while minding the marriage of beans and terpenes in upmarket products that retail for double-digit prices.

Experts will sample only dark chocolate bars without any fruit, nut, candy or spice additives. Milk chocolate and white chocolate products were not considered.

Experts will focus on visual clues that reveal how products are manufactured, handled and stored; flavors that highlight cacao origins, roasting methods and cannabis infusion; and mouthfeel from first bite to final finish.

Legalization outlawed commercially combining cannabis and alcohol, just as some boutique West Coast vintners were producing $400 bud-bouquetted bottles slowly fermented from grape juice and cannabis, artisanally extracting and infusing the botanical herb’s aromas, flavors and effects into fine wine.

Feel free to toast underground winemakers in Sonoma, Mendocino and Mesopotamia — or anywhere grapes and cannabis grow — and invest in a home wine-making rig so you can ferment your own potent potables.

Or you can kitchen-hack cannabis wine at home using a simple, if less elegant, infusion of weed, wine and time.

“Cannabis cuisine. As more states legalize recreational marijuana, the varieties of pot-enhanced food and beverage will increase. Look out for continued interest and acceptance in a host of snacks, treats, and beverages with a little something extra.*”

“*The Specialty Food Association recognizes that Federal law prohibits the possession, sale or distribution of marijuana, but its sale and use is declared legal under some state laws. In recognizing cannabis as a food trend, the SFA in no way endorses or encourages activities which are in violation of state or Federal law.”

Here’s how to DIY cannabis gummies, 1,000-mg brownies and other newly illicit edibles at home.

BY ED MURRIETA

Just gotta have pot gummy bears?

How about canna-butter?

Infused ice cream?

Boozy tincture?

Soda pop and energy shots containing caffeine?

Craving 1,000-mg brownies?

Forget about ‘em. Come Jan. 1, they’ll all be illegal in California medicinal dispensaries and adult-use pot shops under historic laws governing how the botanical herb is cultivated, manufactured, sold and consumed in the Golden State.

This story will be about six banned edibles you can make legally at home.

The progenitor of today’s love affair with food sassed his sultry soup with cannabis stems and seeds in the ‘60s, demonstrating an understanding of ingredients and effects.

BY ED MURRIETA

Jeremiah Tower, America’s first and long-lost celebrity chef, is a cannabis-cuisine pioneer.

But you won’t learn that from watching “Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent,” the fawning documentary film about the life, times, milestones and mysteries of the patrician progenitor of California’s 1970s culinary awakening who reigned over the rebirth of American gastronomy at the peak of the greed-is-good 1980s and retreated from the spotlight before the new millennium.

Raised abroad by wealthy absentee parents and weaned in cruise ships, hotels and boarding schools, Tower enthralled the Bay Area’s foodie elite and social cream with his impeccable palate, worldly glamour and handsome appetites for sex, cocaine and champagne, first at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and then at Stars in San Francisco. Lacking formal culinary training but brimming with brio, Tower splashed fresh, local ingredients with classic elan and dramatic sass. He burst from the kitchen into the dining room, popularizing the American brasserie and charming Americans into a love affair with food.

Reviews upon the book’s publication focused largely on Tower’s influence on California Cuisine and American regional cooking; his tempestuous relationship with Alice Waters, Tower’s former boss, lover and rival; and the personal and professional burnout that sent Tower into self-imposed exile in Mexico two decades ago.

But those reviews overlooked Tower’s contribution to cannabis cuisine: an infused consomme whose preparation and serving demonstrated the chef’s respect of his ingredients, including both their preparation and effects, and care for the people who enjoy his food.

Not only did Tower lay out the technique of heat-activating non-psychoactive THCA into psychoactive THC prior to steeping cannabis in fatty chicken stock (a vital step neglected by many, even Batali, who botched pot brownies last year), Tower deliberately front-loaded his infamous 1969 cannabis menu with an infused course whose effects kicked in as dessert was served, enhancing the enjoyment of the meal without debilitating diners.

And Tower did it with stems and seeds in an era before fancy full-flower extracts, fulfilling a chef’s highest calling: turning lowly ingredients into haute creations.

Today I learned that another one of the chefs I profiled has replaced another one of the chefs I profiled, taking over a commercial kitchen and events space in San Francisco that was mentioned in my June 13 story.

The plot thickens like a good roux as Payton Curry’s plans for that kitchen and dining room on Folsom Street in the city’s pot-dense South of Market district include private cannabis-infused brunch and dinner events that give off a distinct waft of a pop-up test run for a full-fledged cannabis restaurant and impart notes of a community center for cannabis food businesses.

Curry’s concept is vegetable-forward, focused on low-dose THC infusions, plus use wellness-inducing but non-psychoactive cannabinoids like CBD and THCA.

Curry, who cheffed in Michelin-starred restaurants in San Francisco and St. Helena, called me today from Las Vegas, where he’s preparing to roll out Flourish, the edibles brand he launched last year in Arizona and this spring in California.

In the food, infusing recipes with butter or oil prepared with cannabis for diners to experience and absorb as they eat?

Or perhaps with the food, introducing cannabis to diners’ senses of taste and smell in smoked form — a joint, a pipe, a bong delivering flavors, aromas and intoxicating elements that heighten the pleasure of food?

But it might mellow out your caffeine jitters and an array of other ailments — legally around the world as it contains no THC and only CBD, the non-psychoactive botanical component in cannabis and hemp plants that induces mind-and-body relaxation, not trippy head highs.

You don’t need a doctor’s recommendation to drink Mary Jane Java, nor do you need to live in a recreational cannabis state to buy Mary Jane Java.

The combination of cannabis and coffee is at once one of the oldest pleasures and one of the hottest new trends.

The old pleasure is a joint and a cup of coffee — the classic hippie highball. The new trend includes ready-to-drink cold brew coffees and single-brew K-cup pods infused with cannabis.

Looking for another dandy way to enjoy cannabis and coffee without paying $12 at a dispensary? Try candy.

Cannabis-infused caramel candy contains two great coffee enhancements — cream and sugar — plus a psychoactive jolt of THC. The best part is you can turn any coffee, from cheap old-school Folgers to expensive single-origin third-wave finca beans, into cannabis coffee with one drop — that drop being a piece of homemade cannabis-infused caramel candy.

The more accessible 2017 pairing combines three red-hot trends — cold-brewed coffee, artisan cannabis concentrate and low-dose edibles — into a singularly robust concept that boasts the added kick of being the first example of a mainstream company lending its brand to a cannabis product.

Simplicity isn’t always simple. Take brownies: A few pantry ingredients. A bowl or two. Some mixing. And into the oven. In less than an hour, you’re staring at a pan of deliciously humble baked chocolate — and trippy treats if you add cannabis.

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco’s Cannabis State Legalization Task Force was formed in January to prepare the city for cannabis legalization. Today, one day after California voted to legalize cannabis use by adults, the task force delivered preliminary recommendations urging the city to swiftly license cannabis businesses beginning in 2018.

“Prop. 64 creates a very specific state licensing scheme from seed to sale,” said Terrance Alan, chairman of the 22-member task force. “The response needs to be local and focus on how well local jurisdictions implement those license types.”

Alan said the task force is focused on land use, public safety and tourism. Business types include cannabis farms, processing and manufacturing facilities, testing labs, kitchens and cafes.

The Emerald Pot Pairing, held Saturday at a Humboldt County farm, showcased food, wine, beer, cider and cannabis from Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties in a convivial, country-chic atmosphere accented by dabs, tincture-spiked cocktails and a bluegrass band. In short, a perfect day for about 100 locals and visitors to mix, mingle and compare notes about the food, drinks and weed that The Emerald Magazine matched up for its second annual event.

Pear tart is a fall classic. Made with cannabis butter in both the chocolate crust and in the almond filling, my favorite fruit tart is the height of early autumn enhanced with a hidden layer of hashish caramel.

Here in California, Bartletts are the predominant pear. Millions are being picked in the Sacramento Delta right now, bound for grocery stores nationwide. Soft-fleshed Barts stoke the seasonal economy along with sun-grown bud in now-fire-ravaged Lake County, in the hilly orchards north of Napa.

Many versions of pear tarts, from rustic to rarefied, can be found in all the glossy food-porn magazines, cable TV food circuses and Pinterest. Made with peak-season local pears and freshly harvested sun-grown cannabis, my autumn pear tart impresses and intoxicates.

You can adapt my approach to the recipe of your choice. My layering approach allows the flavors of the tart’s components — the chocolatey crust, the almondy filling, the herby caramel and, especially, the freshly harvested pears — to strut without grassy cannabis interference.

Produced by Ed Murrieta, Content Creator & Media Visionary

Content Creator

Media Producer

Editor & Writer

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I've worked as a reporter, writer, editor, streaming media producer, content manager and marketer at leading online news sites, major newspapers and pioneering media start-ups. I'm also a culinary school graduate who's worked in food production and restaurant operations.